Jason Eckert's Website and Blog

The impact of the digital revolution this past decade has made software development a mainstream news topic.

While I’ve written many textbooks on different topics over the past two decades, my favourite subject area by far is Linux.

This month marks the 25th anniversary of my teaching Information Technology (IT) courses for triOS College in Ontario, Canada.

MAGA pun aside, Linux is doing more for Apple hardware than macOS right now… at least in the eyes of some old UNIX nerds like me.

It all started this month last year In March 2022, the alpha release for Asahi was made available and I immediately installed it on a Mac Mini with an 8-core Apple Silicon (ARM64) M1 processor.

Below are 26 questions that detail fun and obscure facts about the Linux operating system.

Back in the late 2000s, my teenage daughter and I went to a local mall one weekend to do some shopping.

2022 was definitely an interesting year.

Any IT sysadmin will tell you that if you don’t schedule time for computer maintenance, your systems will schedule it for you.

RISC vs CISC Traditionally, most computing platforms were built with the burden of software in mind.

By definition, “open source” has little to do with how software is actually created.

Because organizations continually adopt new technologies, the need for skilled IT professionals to support those technologies is always increasing.

What is Asahi Linux?

What is swag?

As I mentioned in my CompTIA blog post All About Linux and Linux+ ( https://www.comptia.org/blog/all-about-linux-and-linux ), Linux is essentially an open-source UNIX operating system.

As I described in my previous blog post, the Burroughs ICON was a very cool UNIX-like computer developed by the Ontario governement for use within schools during the 1980s and early 1990s.

Nicknamed the bionic beaver, the ICON was a Canadian computer funded by the Ontario government and used in schools province wide.

Why use the i3 window manager If you’re a Linux user, you’re probably using a desktop environment that looks like Windows (e.g.

It’s no secret that coffee is one of the most important factors in the development of any technology, including software.

This part of the 1995 Hackers movie shown above is right on par for the time.

Back in 2019, I picked up a rare SPARC-based laptop from the 1990s running Solaris UNIX (marketed as the ultimate UNIX portable on the Tadpole website in 1997).

Exactly 3 years ago, I wrote a non-fiction work of satire called Escaping the Cult of Mac: A Guide from a Cult Survivor to win a bet with some members of the local tech community in Kitchener-Waterloo.

While 2020 introduced a slew of changes to everyone’s personal and professional lives, these changes were considerably less pronounced for those of us working in tech fields.

Over the past two decades, we’ve shifted from running servers bare metal to running them almost exclusively within virtual machines (VMs).

One of the biggest worries that IT users have regarding Apple’s new ARM-based M1 platform is the ability to run virtual machines (VMs) of other operating systems using hypervisor software.

Back in the 1990s, Reduced Instruction Set Computing (RISC) architecture was widely seen as the future.

As this Dilbert comic eloquently illustrates, there’s no shortage of cloud buzz words thrown around today.

I vividly remember the first time I was issued a BlackBerry smartphone back in the 2000s for work.

Software licensing is the catalyst that drives the modern tech industry.

I’ve been a developer for over 3 decades.

If you had asked me in the 1990s whether most people in the tech world would be using a UNIX or Linux shell to manage their servers, I would have chuckled and said “No.”

Simply put, Cybersecurity is an umbrella term that encompasses all aspects of computer, network and data security.

Mainframe computers, like the IBM one shown above, were the first digital computers that started appearing in big companies during the 1950s.

Silicon Valley is an HBO comedy series that aired from 2014-2019.

Lenovo (formerly IBM) ThinkPad laptops are widely known for three things: An amazing keyboard (often touted as the best for professional work) Rugged build quality (it’s hard to kill a Thinkpad: https://youtu.be/OMilj81s9SI) The TrackPoint, which has been…

The very first iMac model (shown above) was released in 1998, came in one colour called Bondi Blue, and had a semi-translucent case that allowed you to see the components inside.

1.

I know what you’re thinking - 2020 sucked!

There are plenty of blog posts on the Web that give sage advice for anyone working in the tech industry.

The command line interface on your system is provided by a shell.

When the pandemic hit earlier this year, schools around the globe quickly embraced online teaching to continue their curriculum.

Technology is a crazy ride, and like that lyric in the Talking Heads song Once in a Lifetime, “…you may ask yourself, well, how did I get here?”

Back in the late 1980’s and early 1990’s, I remember collecting MS-DOS computer viruses.

In the past few decades, people of all ages across North America have become technology-literate in some way or another.

In the technology world today, the term Open is most commonly associated with Open Source.

Whether you’re an IT systems administrator, developer or devop working with Linux/UNIX shell scripts, you’re likely going to come across some that are not well documented and difficult to trace (read and understand) as a result.

The city that I live in (Cambridge, Ontario) was formed as an amalgamation of three smaller towns (Hespeler, Preston and Galt) in 1973.

To be a software developer (a.k.a. programmer or software engineer) today, you don’t need a degree in computer science.

I was around during the birth of the web in the early 1990s and have enjoyed every twist and turn since then.

So your boss gave you a Mac for development.